SIR JAMES DEWAR CRICHTON-BROWNE 549 



fered to him by telegram. He was busy and happy, a brilliant career 

 in Edinburgh, almost inevitably culminating in a professorship, was 

 opening out before him; but his young wife, with sure intuition, 

 felt that he deserved a wider field than Scotland could afford, and so 

 the die was cast, and the migration to Cambridge took place. 



It would not be correct to say that Dewar found himself in a 

 congenial element in Cambridge at that time. His lectures were 

 an unprecedented success; he made some lifelong friends, of whom 

 one, Professor Liveing, much loved and venerated, still happily 

 survives, but some bristles of the Scottish thistle adhered to him, 

 and chemistry and physics had not then come to their own on the 

 banks of the Cam. He had not even such facilities as he had en- 

 joyed in the north. His laboratory was a small room, without a 

 fireplace and badly lighted; apparatus was conspicuous by its 

 absence; and his aspirations, very forcibly expressed, were not very 

 sympathetically received. It was, therefore, with satisfaction that 

 he found himself translated to a more elastic atmosphere when in 

 1877 he was elected Fullerian professor of chemistry at the Royal 

 Institution in succession to Dr. John Hall Gladstone. 



It was in the laboratories of the Royal Institution during his 

 incumbency of the Fullerian professorship that all Dewar's tri- 

 umphs were achieved, more especially those in connection with 

 the liquefaction of gases and the properties of matter at tempera- 

 tures approaching the absolute zero. Faraday, the god of his 

 idolatry in all scientific affairs, had led the way in this explora- 

 tion and had by means of low temperature and pressure succeeded 

 in liquefying all the then known gases except nitrogen, oxygen, 

 and hydrogen, and the compound gases — carbonic oxide, marsh gas, 

 and nitric oxide — and as early as 1874 Dewar was fascinated by the 

 subject, as evidenced by his lecture before the British Association 

 on "Latent heat of liquid gases." In 1878 he showed Cailletet's 

 apparatus in operation in England. It was, however, the suc- 

 cess of Wroblewski and Olsyewski, of Cracow, in liquefying oxygen 

 in 1884 that withdrew him from his earlier preoccupation, with 

 the heat of the sun, electrophotometry, and the chemistry of the 

 electric arc, and supplied the stimulus to his more memorable dis- 

 coveries. In 1885 he was able to show a profoundly moved audience 

 at the Royal Institution the air we breathe made visible as a clear 

 liquid, compressed to one eight-hundredth of its bulk and pro- 

 duced at a temperature of —192° C. In 1893 came oxygen in a 

 solid state, an ultramarine ice produced at —216° C, and in 1897 

 fluorine as a fluid. In the following year appeared liquid hydrogen, 

 and in 1899, a crowning close of the century, that gas in a solid 

 state at a temperature of —260°, or about 13° above the point of 



